The present volume of middle period writings on critical theory, 1963–75, shows Frye at the height of his reputation as a literary critic. By the end of this period, as the editors of the final volume of critical writings point out, his influence had begun to wane as poststructuralism, deconstruction, and the New Historicism began to dominate the field (SeSCT, xxvi). But in 1963, Anatomy of Criticism, published in 1957, had become part of the essential equipment of literary scholars throughout North America. Indeed nineteen of the twenty-eight essays in this volume were published in the United States, as Frye was invited to speak all over the continent.1 But he also drew the regard of British critics, as witnessed humorously by British academic David Lodge: “Wherever Frye is performing, a circus-like atmosphere of excitement and suspense is generated. Attention is focussed on the daring critic on the flying trapeze: will he fall, can he bring off another somersault, is it all faked?”2
In a number of the pieces in this volume, Frye is promulgating, explaining, and elaborating the ideas of the Anatomy—reusing material, as was his wont, but also introducing new examples to supplement the highly compressed discussions of the book. Other short works are a result of his being called upon, as an established scholar, to write reviews and occasional pieces. But this is also the period during which he took a turn in his critical path. On the issues that he considered most basic, Frye’s thought was well integrated from the beginning of his critical activity, so that innovations would occur as aspects or consequences of that body of thought, rather than as unexpected new elements. This does not mean that, in the area of critical theory, originality was unlikely once his system was in place, but that it would take the form of myriads of questionings, findings, reformulations, and asides forming a most diverse and living, but consistent whole. The Anatomy had appeared to some critics to present literature without regard for its social bearings, and though this was an unfair view of the book’s theoretical stance, it is true that the emphasis is on the structure of the imaginative verbal universe; voluntarily, the author focused on this self-contained literary universe, or at least postulated and treated it as self-contained. Self-contained does not mean impenetrable, if only because the literary universe is also a verbal universe, sharing its linguistic structures with a number of other aesthetic, cultural, scientific pursuits. The next step for Frye was to deal with the role of that imaginative verbal universe in human life, with the vocation of critical theory and of the critical theoretician in society, and all the educational responsibilities to which this vocation leads.
The cornerstone of this volume, the monograph The Critical Path, is a vital “hinge” in this transition; with its elaboration of the concept of concern, it marks Frye’s evolution from literary critic to critic in the wider sense, or student of myth, and lays the groundwork for the broader considerations of language, myth, and culture in The Great Code and Words with Power. Many of the shorter pieces included here may be seen to be leading up to The Critical Path, or gravitating around its basic inquiry. But they are also—like all of Frye’s published essays and talks—polished pieces in their own right, and extremely varied in terms of their venues as well as their themes. In this introduction we shall attempt to honour their diversity, as well as the continuity of Frye’s reflection. One of his many talents was his ability to address specific occasions, without ever losing sight of his overall core problematics.
Several of the earlier pieces in the volume are testimony to the extent to which Frye had “arrived” as a critic. “Literary Criticism” (no. 2) is addressed partly to “the profession” (an expression often used by members of the MLA to designate the languages and literatures professoriate) in a widely read MLA handbook designed for aspiring scholars: The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literature, ed. James Thorpe.3 In this essay, which follows essays on linguistics, textual criticism, and literary history, Frye is given free rein to set forth the teachings of Anatomy of Criticism. Much of the essay in fact echoes the “sweeping of the interpreter’s parlour” in the Polemical Introduction, with lengthy arguments against faulty critical procedures such as the attempt to make value judgments (which necessarily reflect the taste of the critic’s own time and personal biases), the defining of a selected tradition, the attempt to introduce the direct experience of literature into criticism, and the intentional fallacy. The remaining, and shorter, part of the essay maintains that literature forms a total order of words and that criticism is a systematic and progressive study of it. (Frye avoids using the word “science” that had proved so contentious in the Anatomy). Such “academic criticism” is an innovative complement to scholarship. Scholarship calls for specialization; criticism calls on the totality of the critic’s intellectual, aesthetic, and psychological resources. It enables him or her to understand and appreciate the literary work in its unity, including apparent discrepancies which contradict the commonly accepted image of it. The academic critic will perceive the total design of a work as revealed by repetition (of images in poetry, characters in fiction) and modulation of these in different contexts, knowing that it is the structure of the poem, rather than everyday usage, which determines the meaning of its words. But above all such a critic will situate the poem in its literary context. In the case of Shakespeare, this means concentrating less on contemporaries and more on such authors as Aeschylus and Sophocles who gave tragedy its form. Genre, convention, and allusion are the guiding threads enabling the critic to situate a given work in the totality of literature, and thus to justify criticism as the complement to literature.
In 1967 Frye contributed to a second MLA volume edited by Thorpe, Relations of Literary Study: Essays on Interdisciplinary Study. This handbook, its editor suggested, was designed for students who had mastered the basic techniques outlined in Aims and Methods and could now extend their vision from a series of perspectives established in the last generation or two;4 the essays included such subjects as “Literature and Biography” and “Literature and Religion.” Frye’s contribution, “Literature and Myth” (no. 15), is probably the most daring text included in this compendium in that it tackles the presence and workings of myth in all societies, and points to the mythical substrata of world religions, including Christianity. Throughout the text, Frye emphasizes the universality of mythical structures: societies and civilizations may transform, edit, censor, diversify, or simplify their mythologies but their forms are strikingly permanent and often survive belief in the historicity of their stories. To Frye, literature derives from mythology; in fact it is in its totality “a civilized, expanded, and developed mythology” (248). He can then characterize “myth criticism” (254) or archetypal criticism as the approach to this body that takes account of its conventions, genres, and recurring images.
Outside the MLA, also, Frye was becoming an authoritative voice in the dissemination of critical theory. “Myth and Poetry” (no. 3) predates the article on myth discussed above. It was a contribution to The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry, a British work that included other distinguished contributors such as Ian Fletcher, Hugh Kenner, John Crowe Ransom, Stephen Spender (one of the editors), and Kathleen Raine. The aim of the encyclopedia was to “allow contemporary critics to report on current literary theory and opinion” in a way that reflected a diversity of approaches.5 In this piece Frye restates the Anatomy’s argument that literature derives from myth by a process of progressive displacement towards realism (137). He traces the evolution of myths as canonical stories, initially oral, in various world religions, through their gradual integration into mythologies embodying those religions, and on to their literary functions once they are partly or wholly detached from their sacred significance. Frye points to the endless imaginative possibilities myth offers, from mere allusion to clothing religious truths in profane stories to retelling old myths in new ways.
“Allegory” (no. 9) is another contribution to a prestigious contemporary encyclopedia, Princeton’s Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1965). The topic is very close to the heart of the critical path, namely the modes of encounter of mythos and logos. For that very reason allegory offers an excellent springboard for reflection upon the fictional translation of ideas and events. It was crucial to delimit a field which by its very nature resists limits. The first limit is that there must be a narrative basis. The second is that an allegorical principle must be explicitly involved in the structure of the work, and there must be continuous reference to the idea or event that is fictionally represented. But beyond these formal allegories, Frye points out, there is a multiplicity of works in which the allegorical principle is present; allegory is “not the name of a form or genre, but of a structural principle in fiction” (172).
The bulk of the article actually concerns not literary allegory as such but allegorical criticism. In the background, and briefly alluded to here (174), are the four levels of meaning derived from Dante—literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic—in which allegorical is the medieval mode of interpretation corresponding to the formal phase in the Anatomy. In fact the encyclopedia article is an expanded form of part of the discussion of formal criticism in Anatomy, pp. 89–92/82–5, which begins, “It is not often realized that all commentary is allegorical interpretation.” The article concerns itself mainly with commentaries on fictions that have an acknowledged allegorical basis, or with the allegorical interpretation of works not initially, or not primarily, conceived as allegories, whether in the rational interpretation of Greek myths or in Christian typology, which shows the Old Testament prefiguring the New (or the New fulfilling the Old). The looser conception of commentary as allegory is alluded to in, for instance, the remarks on psychological and biographical commentary (176).
“Verse and Prose” (no. 10) is a second contribution to the same encyclopedia. The piece, whose subject matter springs from the Fourth Essay of the Anatomy, is actually a condensed reworking of “Manual of Style,” the central section of The Well-Tempered Critic (1963), using many of the same examples. Lacking the latter’s concern with literary education and the social use of words, and also its further distinctions, in the case of each rhythm, between high, middle, and low styles, and between demotic and hieratic tendencies, the encyclopedia article is potentially more straightforward. But Frye’s initial exposition is somewhat confusing. He starts with a distinction between three types of language—ordinary speech, discursive or logical writing, and literature. The second type is ordinary speech conventionalized by sentence structure, and the third is ordinary speech conventionalized by rhythm—except when it is literary prose, in which case it is an imitation of the second type for literary purposes. He then introduces a third way of conventionalizing ordinary speech, associational rhythm, which the reader has difficulty in fitting into the opening division. The Well-Tempered Critic, at least initially, more simply aligns ordinary speech with associative rhythm, prose with sentence rhythm, and verse with regular recurring rhythm (EICT, 342, 343). The bulk of the article is a dazzling survey of the permutations and combinations of the three rhythms—metrical, discursive, and associational—using examples chosen mainly from English literature. These speculations were an early investigation into the uses of language which would eventually result in the different distinctions (metaphorical, conceptual, and descriptive) of The Great Code—in which “ordinary speech” is swallowed up in the descriptive or scientific mode.
Frye’s theories had also drawn the attention and interest of the National Council of Teachers of English, who had been concerned since 1959 with the establishment of an “articulated English program” of sequential learning. Frye’s writings on education and the English curriculum, such as Design for Learning (1962) and “Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship” (1964), were obviously relevant here; but the immediate impetus for a conference on the university English curriculum was the publication, in College English, of Kenneth Rothwell’s article on programmed learning in college English courses, which advocated the embracing of the Anatomy’s “frank acknowledgment that criticism is a science.”6 Frye was invited to address the conference to provide general background. Perhaps in reaction to the extreme empiricism of Roth-well’s article, which proposed most un-Frye-like “teaching machines” and “a periodic table of narrative elements,” Frye’s “Criticism, Visible and Invisible” (no. 6) may well be the most personal text presented in this volume, one that comes closest to a confession of faith, since at times its tone is one of deep commitment to ultimate values. Frye begins by noting the difference (deriving from Plato, as he points out) between knowledge about things and knowledge of things. Knowledge about things is objective; knowledge of them involves some identity of knower and known. Ultimately, what Frye craves for the learner, whether a student or a superbly informed critic, is knowledge of literature: a personal appropriation of the literary work which in turn will bring him/her into contact, potentially, with the entire body of literature. Yet “knowledge about things is the limit of teaching” (147); criticism, the “visible” part of the title, “must point beyond itself, and cannot get to where it is pointing” (150). Thus, criticism is not an end in itself; it is part of education. Understanding places the student on the road to possession; in a way, criticism self-destructs once it has served that purpose. Yet the teaching of literature, understood as opening up the world of words in the widest sense, is crucial towards facilitating the student’s entry into the imaginative experience of that world. Such is the undemonstrable end of the “criticism at once glorified and invisible” (161) of the title.
In another example of outreach, Frye was invited to explain his ideas to the Claremont Reading Conference, a gathering that typically featured more educators, neurologists, and psychologists than literary critics. “Sign and Significance” (no. 22) begins with the familiar distinction between centripetal and centrifugal ways of reading. This distinction, the basis for dividing the literary from the nonliterary, is then applied to criticism, as Frye sees two equally valid approaches, the centripetal (viewing literature as literature), and the centrifugal (viewing it as instrumental to the exposition of truth, the biography or psychology of the poet, or the understanding of the cultural milieu). Centripetal criticism, which grew up as a necessary complement to centrifugal, can itself lead to excessive separation from the context of literature; that is the case with text explication as practised by early New Criticism, a tendency which Frye wishes to remedy by seeing literature as a “unified, coherent, and autonomous body of imaginative experience historically conditioned but not historically determined” (299). The relevance of these distinctions to the teaching of literature and reading is that poetic imagery and rhythm should displace conceptual prose as the centre of a literary education.
The most notable honour to Frye in these years was the holding of a special session on his criticism at the English Institute in 1965—a sign, in the memorable words of Murray Krieger, that “he has had an influence—indeed an absolute hold—on a generation of developing literary critics greater and more exclusive than that of any one theorist in recent critical history.”7 In fact he was the first individual critic, as well as the first living individual, to be so honoured. In “Letter to the English Institute” (no. 12), his explanation for his diplomatic absence from the proceedings, Frye briefly reflects on the systematic nature of his criticism and denies his desire to impose his “system” on other critics. Notable is his use of the concept of “interpenetration,” to become seminal in his later critical work, both for works of literature and for the fruitful plurality of critical approaches. It is in this spirit of critical charity that he entrusts his work to the judgment of the English Institute.
After having read the individual critiques, Frye wrote “Reflections in a Mirror” (no. 13) for inclusion in the volume of proceedings. In the essays there was much to please him, as well as food for thought and no doubt sometimes irritation. The organizers had commissioned one paper by a writer influenced by Frye: Angus Fletcher, who defended Frye’s historical awareness and stressed the Utopian nature of the Anatomy as “a vision of the end towards which criticism tends” (58). This was followed by what Krieger described as “a paper dedicated to respectful dissent” but which its author, William K. Wimsatt, more truly characterized as being in the spirit of the devil’s advocate (75)—if not of the devil himself. Wimsatt, one of the New Critics whose narrowly text-based focus Frye regularly criticized, gave Frye a rough ride: from his perspective Frye was guilty of “violations of logic and order” (84) in his trickster-like conjuring up of patterns that came from his own imagination rather than inhering in literature, and the whole of his scheme was no more than a visionary phantom. Finally, there was a paper from a less committed position which might transcend the polemic: Geoffrey Hartman’s “Ghostlier Demarcations.” This paper obviously gratified Frye by drawing attention to Frye’s aim to “demystify” literature (a most Blakean desire), and its somewhat ambiguous comparison of the Anatomy’s mapping of the literary universe with Baron Haussmann’s wholesale clearing and reordering of Paris. In spite of some philosophical reservations, Hartman found Frye’s criticism “empirically sound: it works; it is teachable; above all it reveals the permanence of Romance” (126). An introductory paper by Krieger summing up the whole volume was not seen beforehand by Frye. Though sympathetic, this piece was in some ways Wimsatt’s view with a positive spin: characterizing Frye as a “Blakean poet-critic” who “claims, in his lunar dialectic, to soar beyond our downward pull” (7), it absolved him from the normal demands of discursive prose and essentially suggested the futility of criticizing him.8
Frye’s response to the three papers he read is measured and courteous, bearing out his lifelong practice of avoiding individual arguments. His discussion of his own criticism returns again to the vexed questions of value judgments, “schematism,” and the notion that the direct experience of literature is pre-critical. He defends the practice of “standing back” from the individual work to see it in outline, viewing in it recurring structural elements that are universal. Therein lies the power of literature: it proposes objective mythical structures to our imagination, making us capable of perceiving and understanding, of resisting conformity, of generating myths of freedom. Thus from a consideration of details he rises to an impassioned statement of his mission. The teaching of literature is seen as part of a social and moral struggle, “the opposition of archetypes to stereotypes,” or the winning for individual and nuanced literary works the response generally given to conventional social mythology (225). This sense of literature as part of the defence against society’s mythological conditioning was to bear fruit in The Modern Century (1967), as well as in the later Critical Path (1971).
Frye’s contention that the critic’s task was not to judge literature—which was part of his attempt to “demystify” literature, to break up what Hartman called “the mystique of English studies” (113) associated with Leavis—proved to be a perpetual thorn in his side, constantly needing explanation and defence. As we saw, he had provided such explanation in the MLA’s Aims and Methods of Scholarship in 1963. Some two years after defending his point of view again, against Wimsatt’s criticism at the English Institute (219–20), he was summoned to the MLA’s annual convention to take part in a debate on value judgments with Murray Krieger. One can understand his rather testy beginning, “I have nothing new to say on this question” (258). He does in fact ignore the epistemological subtleties of Krieger’s argument that to perceive a work as literature in the first place is an act of judgment, and restricts himself to the commonsense notion of judgment as a pronunciation of merit from on high. The resulting talk is a fine and surely persuasive summary of his reasons for distrusting such judgments: the fact that criticism is a structure of knowledge, whereas value judgments relate to private experience; the importance to the scholar of accepting all data in the field; the fact that value judgments vary with historical circumstances; and the impossibility of establishing valid criteria for greatness. This is not one of the pieces in which Frye makes great claims for the teaching and study of literature. In this context, in which he is defending knowledge over an indefinable “taste,” it suits him to end rather by satirizing the current treatment of literature as a way to experience “the uniqueness of human beings,” “the fulness of humanity,” or other vaguely impressive obfuscations, rather than as “something to be taught and studied like anything else” (265).
During this period Frye was understandably in great demand as a speaker. His reputation as a Shakespearean scholar was based largely on work on the comedies,9 and “The Structure and Spirit of Comedy” (no. 7) marks his participation in the seminars given in connection with the 1964 Stratford Shakespearean Festival. Since the Shakespearean plays offered that year were both tragedies, Frye’s outline of the most basic pattern of characters and plots of comedy is drawn largely from the non-Shakespearean comedies and musical productions on view, though he gives frequent examples from Shakespeare. His analysis is based on the four pregeneric mythoi of the Third Essay of the Anatomy. In contrast with the tragic, which dramatizes “the primary contract between man and the state of nature,” and the ironic, which acts out “the secondary contract between the individual and his society” (163), the comic and the romantic show human beings liberated from these contracts. While romance tends to depict human beings in unity with nature, comedy tends towards emancipating them from the more oppressive forms of the social contract. The piece ends with Frye’s characteristic appreciation of the profound and liberating nature of the illusion presented by comedy.
“Old and New Comedy” (no. 21) shows his taking part in a similar series of lectures on Shakespeare in the English Stratford-on-Avon in 1968. Frye begins by admitting that Old and New Comedy are two well-defined, historically determined conventional forms of Greek theatre “that can never recur” (285); yet he proceeds to trace their subsequent evolution into two much wider types of comedy. It is New Comedy that gives rise to the typical comic structure discussed in no. 7 and used by Shakespeare and Molière. The structure of Old Comedy, on the other hand, is dialectical rather than teleological; based on an agon or conflict, it is more argumentative and conceptual than New Comedy and can accommodate seemingly extraneous or plotless elements such as monologue; its characters are vehicles of the contest rather than functions of the plot. Frye shows the ramifications of these patterns in related genres such as vaudeville dialogue, the sentimental novel, and Rabelaisian satire in a wide-ranging survey that must have left his audience breathless.
Comedy and romance are the genres with which Frye is most commonly associated (he famously called himself an Odyssey critic on the first page of A Natural Perspective). It is not always recognized that he also had a particular interest in satire, part of his attraction to anatomies and other exuberant forms of prose fiction.10 This interest did not result in a large volume of published work on satire, but he was on the board of a short-lived journal on the subject, and as such produced a brief statement (no. 8) on the question of whether reference to a moral norm is essential to satire. His argument is that the norm is implicit, being the standard against which the thing satirized appears grotesque, but that it need not have a spokesman or representation in the text: “it is the reader who is responsible for ‘putting in’ the moral norm, not the satirist” (170). Since the question had arisen in connection with Arnold Kettle’s having maintained that Jonathan Wild was a failure because it had no strong character to embody the morally good position, Frye typically spends one paragraph of his two in attacking the critical fallacy of saying that any accepted work is a “failure” for any reason.
By his very presence and his delivery of the opening remarks to the conference on editorial problems held at the University of Toronto (no. 16), Frye showed his willingness to welcome editors as “a central part of the conception of a community of scholars” (256). Apart from this opening courtesy, however, the remarks are remarkable for what they do not say. The scholars might well have expected to be greeted with a gratifying acknowledgment of how editors are an essential if underappreciated part of the literary endeavour, helping new authors to achieve clarity, or, in this eighteenth-century context, restoring corrupt texts and bringing hitherto lost works to light. No such compliments emerge. Essentially, the editors are told to stand back, and are treated to a diatribe against the “editorial zeal for improvement and consistency” which leads them egotistically to emend and correct authors and—in an obvious allusion to Frye’s bête noire, The Chicago Manual of Style—“put commas wherever they were most likely to spoil the rhythm and blur the sense” (257).11 In a backhanded gesture towards fairness, Frye says that bad editors are just the same as bad critics who make value judgments. Like the ideal critic, the ideal editor should strive for transparency, so as to offer to the reader’s understanding, not a recreated object but an object for the reader to recreate.
The ideas on criticism that Frye expressed in such public appearances and lectures, far-reaching as they are, are nevertheless only the polished outcroppings of a vast imaginative structure he was elaborating in his mind and notebooks during this period. It had always been part of his ambition to study the whole range of human culture; at the age of twenty-four he announced that he proposed to spend the rest of his life “on various problems connected with religion and art” which “constitute, in fact, the only reality of existence” (NFHK, 425–6). Having moved from a study of an individual author in Fearful Symmetry to a survey of all literature in Anatomy of Criticism, his sense of context demanded now a “Third Book” to investigate the verbal universe of which that literature formed a part. Throughout the period covered by the present collection he speculated on this Third Book in notebooks that have now appeared as volume 9 of the Collected Works. Its editor Michael Dolzani has described in detail the mandala diagram by which Frye envisaged the order of words as a whole: a circle with four quadrants formed by two intersecting axes (TBN, xxxii–xxxvi). The Third Book—a “kind of critical Divine Comedy” provisionally entitled The Critical Path (TBN, 123)—was never written, and the present Critical Path is a small spinoff more narrowly focused on the critic and society. But the knowledge of its presence in the background does provide a guide through some of Frye’s contemporary essays and illuminate the direction in which he was moving.
The essence of the envisaged Third Book was the conception of myth as the origin of all human verbal constructs; the work was to study its various displacements and embodiments. As we have seen, Frye had already established a reputation as an authority on the relations between literature and myth: the Anatomy was generally viewed as the definitive outline of “myth criticism.” But at the end of no. 15—encouraged, perhaps, by the interdisciplinary nature of the booklet he was writing for—Frye widened his purview to that larger area of which literature is a part: the “total mythopoeic structure of concern” (254), no less than the entire domain of the humanities and in many ways the social sciences, the totality of humankind’s visions of itself through the ages as it dreams of ever-renewed metamorphoses. This key notion of concern had first been used in the speech “Speculation and Concern” of 1965 (WE, 242–60), which sought the essential distinction between the sciences and humanities. Thereafter Frye frequently referred to such subjects as literature, religion, political science, and philosophy as the mythical, concerned, or existential subjects,12 as opposed to the more objective sciences. The speech “Literature and Society” (no. 18) gives a brief story of the evolution of this widening cultural perspective. Gradually, Frye realized that literature does not convey information or truth straightforwardly, that it communicates in a variety of indirect, associative, ambiguous, and metaphorical ways. This led him to accept the existence of a mythical, as opposed to a logical habit of mind, of situations where truth of correspondence must give way to “a kind of truth of revelation” (270). His course on the Bible was based on the premise that the Bible, too, required to be read with a “mythical” rather than a logical attitude; that is, to be read as a representation of human destiny rather than of its exact history. Once again, Frye characterizes myth as the language of concern, here described as “man’s view of himself and his destiny … his concern about where he came from and where he is going to … all his hopes and his ideals, his anxieties and his panics” (274). Thus moving myth to the centre of the human endeavour to build society, he points out that the thinkers who change civilization (such as Freud, Marx, or Rousseau) are the ones who reformulate mythology. All who are acquainted with The Critical Path will hear a startling resonance in the (evidently autobiographical) concluding sentence: “The critic, whose role in the last two decades has expanded from studying literature to studying the mythologies of society, has to join with all other men of good will, and keep to the difficult and narrow way between indifference and hysteria” (279).
Several items in this collection bear witness to Frye’s immersion in the study of myth and its ramifications. It might be said that the publication in 1964 of the English translation of Gaston Bachelard’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire with a preface by Frye (no. 4) constitutes in itself a significant event in the history of critical theory internationally. Bachelard died in 1962, and it was apparently Frye who persuaded the Beacon Press to publish his work in English.13 In France, Bachelard, although his background and his earlier writings were on the philosophy of science, became known in the literary area as the father of Nouvelle Critique. This dual role was by no means as paradoxical as might first appear. As an historian and philosopher of science he deconstructed the dominance of rationality by showing the irrationality of reason in the writings of even the most rigorous scientists and philosophers, who were often epistemologically vulnerable owing to emotional factors. This journey into the recesses of the psyche made him acknowledge that poetic imagery also originates in the psyche, and that poets and scientists share certain basic primal patterns. Thus the scientist, conscious of the psychological sources of his views, must be self-critical in regard to his own rationality, and the critic, in explicating poetry, can claim and practice a certain measure of science.
In approaching Bachelard, Frye finds a kindred spirit in that the “complexes” observed by Bachelard may well correspond to Frye’s archetypes. These are detected by the imagination on the basis of analogy (with experience) and identity (among series of images). The Psychoanalysis of Fire focuses on myths and poetic representations of fire, and on poetic visions whose common denominator is fire, one of the four elements traditionally seen as composing the inorganic world. By his fourfold classification of poetic images and the myths they animate Bach-elard creates a typology which inspires Frye to credit him with an “expanding insight into literature” (142).
Joseph Campbell was another of the modern investigators of myth who—like Bachelard, Jung, and Eliade—in some way influenced Frye.14 In a late notebook Frye remarks that Campbell’s well-known The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) is “a book I’m now finally reading for the first time” (LN, 444), but if so he must have engaged in a certain academic fakery, as he comments in The Educated Imagination on Campbell’s myth of the hero (EICT, 455); the book also appears in a note to the Anatomy (361/399n. 87).15 “After the Invocation, a Lapse into Litany” (no. 5) is a review of Occidental Mythology, the third volume of Campbell’s The Masks of God, but it quickly by-passes the relative simplicity of the book review genre. Frye’s puzzling title refers ironically to the fact that Campbell had, at the outset, a chance to describe a universal system of religious mythologies; Frye presents the “invocation” or introductory survey as doing just that, by contrasting the Western religions based on a personal and creating deity with Eastern ones based on an unconditioned experience of the cycles of nature. But the construction of such a vast scenario is aborted by the author’s decision to treat the various religions historically, that is, narratively and diachronically: this constitutes the lapse into “litany,” or humdrum formulaic units. Thus Campbell settles in to describe the genesis and evolution of single myths, rather than the ultimately interconnected mythological structure of religions, Eastern and Western.
In 1968, Frye had occasion to produce a piece of “applied Bachelard” when he contributed “The Myth of Light” (no. 20) to an issue of the visual arts magazine artscanada devoted to light. Frye’s aim is to show the quintessential importance of light from prehistoric to modern times and across all fields of human endeavour. Characteristically he treats light as a myth; “symbol” might be the more appropriate term, since there are few extended stories about light here, but Frye is concerned to show, through light, how myth is used to shape our perception of the world. He treats light as a symbol with a certain core meaning (roughly, the ideal of clarity or truth) and a range of variable implications; as he commented later, “myths and archetypes have no unchangeable substance: they are infinitely flexible and adaptable.”16 He rapidly traces the phases of the understanding of light in human history, moving through the religious, the psychological, and the scientific eras; again characteristically, he includes the formulations of modern physics in order to show that the scientific world view is also based on a mythical framework.
In his Third Book speculations, Frye organized the mainly nonliterary displacements of myth along the two axes of his circular diagram: a horizontal “axis of speculation” or political and historical thought, and a vertical “axis of concern” or religious and philosophical conceptions. One of the chief Third Book topics was to be “contracts and Utopias,” which Frye considered to lie at the Western and Eastern ends respectively of the axis of speculation—the Western end being associated with the fall, necessity, and law, the Eastern with sunrise, freedom, and social optimism. “Varieties of Literary Utopias” (no. 11) could be considered a preliminary study. The axis of speculation is not named, but nevertheless contract and Utopia are presented as two contrasting conceptions involving the nature, possession, and uses of power which need to be expressed mythically. The social contract looks to origins, whereas the Utopia is oriented towards a future telos; the contract has some pretensions to historicity, while the Utopia is purely imaginative and hypothetical, being dedicated to “visualizing possibilities” (197). Later the two are polarized again in terms of their affinity for tragedy or comedy (204). Besides “straight” Utopias and Utopian satires, a number of constructions mentioned by Frye are in some ways only shaped by Utopian thought without completely fulfilling the definition of Utopia as genre: the pastoral, topsy-turvy worlds such as the Land of Cockayne, the worlds created by science fiction on the basis of a catastrophic event or invention, returns to the simplicity of nature and to a state of innocence or peacefulness favourable to the fulfilment of the individual, and the many forms of protest against the invasiveness of modern civilization. Thus what lies at the heart of this inquiry is not the desire to define and classify Utopias, but the portrayal of the Utopian imagination whereby certain literary works communicate a constructive vision inspiring us to modify the present existentially. So close is this to the goal of education itself as Frye conceives it17 that he is led to suggest that the Utopia is really a projection into the future of a systematic view of education (203).
An invitation to address the Ontario branch of the Canadian Bar Association in 1970 provided an opportunity for Frye to discuss some considerations relating to the Western or “contract” end of the axis of speculation, though of course the bedrock from which the piece is hewn is not obtruded on the audience. “Literature and the Law” (no. 23) is a tour de force, notable not only for its urbane style and witticisms (Frazer is “one of the most impressive examples of how much can be contributed to culture and learning by someone who is called to the bar and who does not respond” (301), but also for the immense vistas it opens. Beginning with a survey of legal themes in nineteenth-century British novels, Frye links these to the class structure, current social attitudes, and even the national character in a display of historical awareness he is often said to lack. The paper moves on to larger questions of the nature of law and its limitations, with some topical allusions to current attempts to stifle social protest in connection with the war in Vietnam (304, 308). Frye points out that gradually a more critical attitude towards what is and what is not legal, including what should and should not be censored, has arisen, and that literature has been a social pioneer in challenging laws that embodied mere class prejudice or taste. (He himself feels that hate literature and vocabulary are far more offensive than pornography.) He contrasts the police state with the society that has an open and visible legal system, in connection with which the word “contract” appears (307), derived from the Bible’s contract between God and fallen man. Literature emancipates, both in showing the horror of situations where law is perverted, as in Kafka’s The Trial, and in helping to form the social imagination of the free man who internalizes and in a sense rises above the law.
Art, according to Dolzani, is located at the point of intersection of the two axes in Frye’s mandala diagram, as it unites subjective and objective perception at a point of epiphany (TBN, xxxvi). Dolzani considers no. 14, “Design as a Creative Principle in the Arts,” to be related to this line of thought, which includes the importance of arts education. The paper turns on the commonality between arts. Thus in the visual arts, with the rise of democracy, artistic creation and utilitarian production have been brought much closer by a common factor: design. When realistic and representational art loses impetus, abstract art comes in experimenting with form—but that is also true of “folk art.” As the study of the arts becomes internationalized due to unprecedented resources in the media, museums, and galleries, both artists and art educators can make innovative comparisons on the basis of design. In literature, pure abstraction is impossible owing to the referential nature of words, and differences between languages slow down the internationalizing tendency. Nevertheless there are structural principles analogous to design in the repeated motifs of myth and metaphor. Frye suggests that these could provide a more fruitful basis for the study of Comparative Literature than the “myopic” one (presumably based on traditional literary history viewed internationally) at present used.18
In “Charms and Riddles” (no. 27) Frye embarks upon an investigation which he intentionally introduces as a genre study, noting how fragile the concept of genre remains. He refers to a “botanical analogy,” but he does not call on botany as a classificatory field of knowledge to show how, similarly, genre distinctions help us to classify literary works. Rather, he uses the analogy to show how certain basic narrative forms (the trees and branches) bear leaves and flowers and fruit (corresponding to conventions), and how innovation occurs in the manner of seeds and kernels developing, charm and riddle being such kernels. This talk too could be considered in the light of the Third Book speculations, which among other things sought to study the growth of nonliterary forms from prose kernels. Here Frye surveys not just the folklore originals and the literary imitation of charm and riddle but their ramifications: propaganda and advertising can also exploit the techniques of charms, but so can religious practices, even of the highest order (e.g., vows or invocations).
In one Third Book notebook, charm and riddle are names for the opposing poles of the axis of speculation (TBN, 43). In this piece the two are contrasted in various ways, charm being associated with sound and music and riddle with sight and shapes, charm with magic and riddle with the escape from magic, and so on. The transition from charm to riddle, Frye says, has analogies with the way the emotional involvement with oracle “may suddenly reverse itself and become intellectual detachment” or laughter (381)—a covert allusion to a mysterious “oracle to wit” epiphany he once experienced.19 As he wrote in a notebook, “The function of the work of art is to epiphanize the centre. … One primitive appeal is the charm or riddle that catches the epiphany in a trap” (TBN, 18). In this case the sense of revelation occurs when the writer of charm or riddle renounces power over the world of things to recreate a verbal world close to the world of things, yet free of it, and liberating.
What we have been saying suggests that Frye’s critical path was leading him naturally to the study of the displacements of myth—and thus eventually to the Bible as the main source of that myth for Western culture. But there were pressures in the late 1960s that also drew him from literary criticism proper to the role of the verbal disciplines in society. At the end of Fearful Symmetry and in the Anatomy and its elaborations, Frye had been incidentally emphasizing the role of the literary critic—in practice, the university English professor—as the guide to a grammar of literary symbolism that could be objectively taught regardless of its spiritual significance. But during the West’s Cultural Revolution, the student protest movement, it was precisely this detached attention to literary shapes and structures that came under attack. Calls were made for the university to be on the cutting edge of social progress: instead of training conformists to run the Establishment, it should concentrate instead on raising consciousness, and thus naturally oppose the war in Vietnam, the consumer society, and the military-industrial complex and all its works. In this new dispensation, the “mythological” subjects or humanities were to be “concerned” to the point of being morally committed. To Frye, however, this was a total misunderstanding of the “social context of literary criticism”; his reaction was to explore more deeply the value to society itself of impartial and disinterested scholarship, which he did in a series of talks and articles culminating in The Critical Path.
The tone of the preface is playfully self-deprecating: The Critical Path is a “farce” both because the initial text is stuffed with new elements (in French “farcir” means to stuff) and because it is a farcically over-developed form of a number of lectures. Unfortunately we lack the text of two of them, those at Berkeley “which outlined the concern-and-freedom thesis” (5). This central thesis of The Critical Path, as we shall see, posits a necessary and constant tension between freedom and concern; in educational terms, Frye makes a distinction between the concerned subject matter of the humanities and the freedom of the critic studying it, who is “not himself concerned but detached” and whose “criteria are those of the myth of freedom, depending on evidence and verification” (67). “The universities are the social centres of the myth of freedom, and are, by necessity, devoted to the virtues of the truth of correspondence, including objectivity and detachment” (95); their goal is to examine the myth of concern by the standards of the myth of freedom (75, 92). Whereas Frye in no. 11 had seen Utopias as essentially liberating hypothetical models, he now associates the influx of radical and Utopian schemes of reform with a new kind of commitment, a desire to establish an improved social contract and at the same time “to transform the university, in particular, into a society of concern, like a church or political party” (95). The classical Utopias, however, shadow forth an “educational contract,” centred in the university, that eschews this kind of committed action. In this sense The Critical Path may be viewed, as it was by more than one reviewer, as a counter-statement to the student revolution.20 But as Frye astutely noted in a contemporary notebook, “The Children’s Crusade is obviously running out of gas, & too much of it in CP would date it” (RT, 116). The essay survives splendidly the passing of its occasion, and could be considered a classical modern statement of the liberal humanist position that it examines historically.21
The titles of many of Frye’s books succeed in conveying briefly and brilliantly the core of the thoughts he will develop; this is particularly the case of The Critical Path. The fact that the text only gradually became an independent book does not detract from its specific identity as a program of theoretical orientation devised by Frye for himself at first. He indicates the mixed origin of the “critical path” metaphor: on the one hand it comes from an expression used by the management of the 1967 Expo in Montreal to emphasize the need for guiding their complex plan to completion efficiently; and on the other hand it was used by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason when, dismissing both scepticism and dogmatism, he sees the “critical path” as the only open one. It is our view that the metaphor indeed continued to guide Frye on his journey through complex territories offering many choices and therefore risks of straying from his main purpose. At the outset, Frye sought to formulate a theory of literary criticism; but this depends upon a theory of literature itself. Thus Frye affirms, first of all, the specificity of literature, a “unity in itself” (15) to which all works of literature belong, so that the role of criticism is to elaborate upon the relationship between single works and the universal body. This is the point at which the critical path begins; however, the reader soon discovers that it is a challenging and complicated path leading to a number of crossroads, since literature, the object of the inquiry, is of a paradoxical nature. Limiting our study to the literary system would certainly be faithful to the concept of literature as self-subsistent unity which Frye affirms. On the other hand it would leave unexplored the obvious and universal interaction between literature and society, which he also affirms. The path “comes together” when it is realized that criticism is itself a social function because literature is rooted in civilization and the knowledge and experience of it cannot be severed from these roots. Criticism must therefore take into account this implicit duality.
Detours continue to appear along the path. One of these is that of the epistemological and methodological identification between criticism and a range of human sciences: psychology, sociology, anthropology. Criticism must find its own way of accounting for the creations of literature, and that principle also leads to the rejection of biographical, philological, and historical circumstances as their causes. Even an author’s intention fails to establish the case for such causation. Frye’s watchfulness over the specific development of literature among human phenomena, along with the consequent need for literary criticism to base its findings upon literature alone, is congruent with a number of theoretical stances already current in the 1960s and early 1970s. In his paper entitled “The Fall of Literary History,” read at the sixth congress of the International Comparative Literature Association,22 René Wellek argued that a number of denials of the specificity of literary history can be shown to arise at least in part from a common misconception regarding the concept of cause: alone, literary phenomena relating to other literary phenomena can give rise to a history of literature. This view was common to Czech structuralism, Russian formalism, New Criticism, Nouvelle critique, and the American-based reaction in Comparative Literature studies against what was perceived as the “continental” practice of literary history exemplified by the ghost of “Lansonisme” in France, with its theoretically flawed notion of “fact.”
Should the path venture into comparative aesthetics? In this text Frye makes short shrift of this question on the basis of what he perceives as a lack of interest for the subject among “technically competent” (7) literary critics. Yet “interarts” studies were being actively pursued, among other venues, in the “Literature and other Arts” discussion groups of the MLA. Frye does not deny that there exist imaginative universes other than the “verbal imaginative universe” the critical path is to explore. His inquiry will, however, be limited to the latter.
Once the critic treads this territory of his very own the central question arises: how to derive “poetic meaning” from “poetic language”? Here, Frye diverges from New Criticism, which he sees as limiting itself to the “linear” reading of single works instead of proceeding from the structure of imagery of an individual poet’s works to its concordance with genres, conventions, and archetypes which are universal. Frye does not seem to take into account that in their detailed readings New Critics often pursued, implicitly or explicitly, the goal he describes, thus avoiding the “centripetal fallacy.”
The critic’s territory has now been delimited but a new crossroads appears. Throughout the ages and across borders and continents, literature has been anything but static, and its function within culture and society constantly undergoes fundamental changes. At this point, the critical path encounters the dichotomy of mythos and logos, their partings and coincidings, and their intimate connection with the development of “myths of concern.” Often, the poet has been the keeper of the myth of concern couched in “the language of belief” (23). In describing the myth of concern, and the “myth of freedom” which it often generates and at other times limits, Frye has brought the path to a territory which could perhaps best be identified as psychohistory (“histoire des mentalités”), so vast is the range of phenomena and time spans it encompasses. The myth of freedom arises when the writer challenges the myth of concern rather than reinforcing it. A major instance occurs when aspirations to “truth of correspondence” (28) challenge loyalties to belief. This, of course, is no less than the rise of scientific discourse as it detaches itself from mythological and/or theological discourse in describing phenomena of nature, as for example in the case of the Copernican revolution.
Myths of concern can be world religions—most often Frye brings in the Judaeo-Christian world view with its Biblical foundations—or they can be other vast doctrinal constructs such as Marxism with its at times iron grip upon machinery of state and economy. Such “myths” generate conservative loyalties or movements of opposition and dissent. This is where Frye sees a major function for criticism in service to a liberalizing spirit. The poet sometimes indicts, sometimes denounces the reigning tyranny, and the critic has been known to call the poet to order in service to concern, or to sustain him in his clamour for redress.
While it is true that innumerable writers at innumerable times—prominently, resisters against Nazism before and during the Second World War—have embodied this aspect of the myth of freedom, it can hardly be said that protest is the primary function of poets and critics; and Frye (if that were his message here) might be faulted for portraying the dialectic of freedom and concern in a way that betrays the very criticality of the path. But at its core the message primarily emphasizes the evocative power of the written word, which enables the reader’s mind to judge its discursive content. Today we witness the dramatic opposition between Islamic fundamentalism and less dogmatic, more liberal and peaceful interpretations of the Koran; Frye would undoubtedly encourage scholars to further read the Koran as literature, and reflect upon its structural linkages with world literature and thought.
From ancient times, but particularly from the Renaissance on, critics have been social complements to poets, maintaining the equilibrium between concern and freedom. The critical path relentlessly returns to the function of literature in a postmodern society where mythos is completely divorced from logos and literary discourse from informative discourse of any discipline. In this world, the function of literature, according to Frye, constantly renews itself as the poet’s universe of verbal imagination, connotation, and figuration brings the individual reader into contact with culture at large. In Frye’s own words, we thus return to “where our critical path began, in the contrast between an existing world and … an unborn world” (115) of imagination, an analogical world which offers respite but soon demands that we return, with expanded horizons, to the existing world. To make this possible is the vocation of criticism.
The Critical Path thus delivers an openly idealistic message oriented towards the cultivation of human happiness and social harmony. In this regard it has been said that Frye is the last of the Modernists. That would apply primarily with respect to his thought of the ’60s, of which The Critical Path is a major expression, rather than to his subsequent work. It could also be said that the panoramas of the critical path seldom if ever feature Canadian realities, except, perhaps, unconsciously, when Frye reacts to “the American way of life” as the myth of concern which challenges us to be ourselves.
Frye was pleased with The Critical Path; in one of his notebooks he writes that the book “turned out to be one of the most articulate & central pieces of writing I’ve ever done,”23 while in another he remarks on “the lucidity, almost the luminousness, of my Critical Path essay” (RT, 113). Its main “concern and freedom” thesis is, indeed, clearly articulated and illuminating. But there remain a few puzzles for the careful reader. One of these has to do with the nature of the myth of freedom. Concern can readily be envisaged as embodied in a myth, but where is the mythos or story for freedom, which often appears rather as a scientific or critical habit of mind, or the writings that exemplify this attitude, stressing non-mythical elements (29)? This is perhaps a question of terminology and not too serious a stumbling block;24 more challenging for the reader is to follow the somersaults of the interchange between concern and freedom. Poets are the original spokesmen for concern, yet they become part of the myth of freedom in Renaissance humanism—not because they upheld the scientific attitude, but because they studied Classical authors, who favoured liberty. Yet these same Renaissance poets provide a rhetorical analogue to concerned truth according to Sidney. And the Classical poets embody the true myth of concern for Matthew Arnold because they inform culture, which is a more inclusive basis for society than the Christian myth. Arnold’s culture becomes, however, one version of the educational contract at the centre of the myth of freedom (112). Poets, as children of concern, can never be the focus of a myth of freedom (61), but they appear to be so when they protest against a tyrannical “scientism” which is a myth of concern formed from the perversion of the myth of freedom.
These may perhaps be difficulties attendant upon making generalizations about any historical situation. But Frye himself came to a welcome clarification when, in the years after The Critical Path, he worked out a distinction between primary and secondary concern. Primary concern—the basic needs of survival, food, and so on—became the sum of what poets express through archetypal myth and metaphor, while secondary concern is ideology, whether social and religious mythology or the “message” that individual poets think they are conveying. The spiritual dimension of primary concern then takes on some of the aspects of the myth of freedom—not in the sense of scientific questioning, but in enabling the imaginative freedom that the end of The Critical Path calls the “concern beyond concern,” the grammar or language of all concern.
The remaining essays to be discussed, written like no. 27 after the completion of The Critical Path, fall into a Frye-like pattern of pairs. The first pair, nos. 25 and 26, are focused on space and time respectively, while nos. 24 and 28 are autobiographical reflections on Frye’s scholarly career. The title of no. 25, “The Times of the Signs,” is designed to capture the reader’s attention by reversing the well-known expression “the signs of the times,” and thus asserting that a crucially significant epoch will be discussed in terms of learning better to read the signs that the universe allows mankind to intercept. That epoch is of course that of the Copernican revolution. The piece, basically a study of scientific and literary cosmology, continues Frye’s meditations on concern and freedom, myth and science. Nowhere is Frye disputing the autonomy of science. He is establishing and asserting the enduring and complementary presence of imaginative thinking in all its forms, which he gathers under the name of mythology; and he proceeds to deal with the many confusions which have arisen between the two visions. Only gradually did science emancipate itself from social anxiety. But establishing the physical universe as an absolutely separate object of knowledge and research, while yielding incalculable benefits for mankind’s life in it, does not alleviate, and even intensifies, the need to perceive that universe as a human home. And that is the function of the mythopoeic imagination in all its many forms, whether religious or aesthetic. The interrelated myths of concern and freedom are functions of the human spirit in its struggle to resist submitting to a technological model. Science can and must develop autonomously, but turning the scientific mind upon humankind itself, which is what occurs in the social sciences, will not quench humanity’s unending thirst for new imaginary worlds, those of the arts, with their power to transform reality.
“The Rhythms of Time” (no. 26), an address to a thematic conference on time in Romanticism, provides Frye with another opportunity to situate himself in relation to the fundamental paradox of the critical path. The study of a theme such as time in a purely “thematological” way, as it was conceived, for example, by Jean-Pierre Richard and Raymond Trousson, would go a long way towards embodying Frye’s drive towards the search for literariness as the supreme criterion; yet he could not avoid the central reality of time in human life: that of the individual person, that of society, that of the church, that of the universe. The result is an astonishingly philosophical excursion into the poetry of time as it sometimes succeeds in eliciting from language the image or symbol that will awaken the poet’s and through him or her the reader’s imagination to the omnipresence and omnipotence of time. Traditional visions of the rhythms of the cosmos once provided a way of transcending the time of ordinary experience; the time consciousness of the Romantics, a consequence of the new cosmology discussed in no. 25, “tends to be immanent rather than transcendent” (365). While extolling the redemption of time through Romantic mythopoeia, Frye ends with the paradox that we gain a sense of real historical awareness from the realistic novelists who have resisted the pull of Romanticism.
“The Search for Acceptable Words” (no. 24) arose out of an invitation to participate in a conference on institutional support for research in the humanities; Frye declined, perhaps because his type of scholarship is not what is normally known as “research.” (One is reminded of his remark that “There are critics who can find things in the Public Records Office, and there are critics who, like myself, could not find the Public Records Office.”)25 But he did submit a written paper, which defines, in a very personal way, the vocation of the humanities in the present world. This was his way of responding to the concern which was current among Canadian institutions—and still is—of describing the work of the humanist and even to some extent of the social scientist in a way that would creatively compare with that of their colleagues in the exact sciences. In spite of his belief in the possibility of a science of criticism, he rejects the “pseudoscientific analogy” (313) as seen, for instance, in the “philological” model with its overemphasis on Quellenforschung regarding individual works, and on old rather than recent literature. Rather he stresses the importance of personal influence in the humanities. Drawing attention to the mythological universe which lies behind all verbal disciplines, he suggests that interdisciplinary scholarship may be the way forward in the humanities. His contribution to the topic of the university’s support for research focuses mainly on the importance of stocking the library, for which he advocates a nonjudgmental inclusion of popular literature and noncanonical works.
“Expanding Eyes” (no. 28) was written as a response to Angus Fletcher’s discussion of Frye’s criticism in Critical Inquiry. Though Frye declines at the opening to discuss Fletcher’s particular points, and indeed barely alludes to him in his essay, it seems probable that he was responding chiefly to Fletcher’s observation that Frye followed the accepted literary canon with its acknowledged masterpieces,26 and that he lacked a developed phenomenology of reading. While upholding his original condemnation of value judgments, Frye now feels free to acknowledge the importance of personal enthusiasms and influences; his point is that the verbal universe, with its central classics, resonates with and enriches whatever writer interests us as individuals. What young scholars really need, and many have experienced as Frye himself did with Blake, is to immerse themselves in the imaginative world of some major writer, a personal experience with an impersonal core.
In the third part of the essay Frye emphasizes some of the positive, creative, and participatory virtues of the arts. They are “possible techniques of meditation, in the strictest sense of the word, ways of cultivating, focusing, and ordering one’s mental processes, on a basis of symbol rather than concept” (406). In fact they can be mandalas; Frye even invokes the four gods Hermes, Eros, Adonis, and Prometheus, the presiding deities of the four quadrants of his Third Book diagram, arranged here not in a circle but in a line of ascent and descent which prefigures the axis mundi of creative insight in Words with Power. Literature has the potential to draw the critic and the reader into a personal response, into renewed and renewing participation in the experience of mankind; the philosopher of culture is himself/herself involved as witness to this redeeming power. The title of the piece, “Expanding Eyes,” refers to Blake’s vision of the ability of mankind to “behold the depths of wondrous worlds” once the poetic unconscious is given free rein. Such an image is an excellent one with which to associate Frye as he continues into the final stage of his ever-widening critical path.
JEAN O’GRADY
EVA KUSHNER